


My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad.

by PaleBlueEis



Series: an age at least to every part [3]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: CW: vague reference to possible dub con in the past, Chelsea Physic Garden, Cross-Generational Friendship, Drinking & Talking, G. K. Chesterton mention, M/M, Nonbinary Character, Pining, Singing, William Blake mention, fake british slang wile, vague reference to sex work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-23
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:13:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 17,003
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27663869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PaleBlueEis/pseuds/PaleBlueEis
Summary: "Crowley was a conversational disaster, a demonic Hindenberg of discourse who should not be allowed out in public, at least not with young people."____________________After a long lunch with Aziraphale, Crowley heads to a bar to drink, pine, and pose nonsensical questions to his brandy glass. When a young human actually answers, Crowley turns down what's on offer, but thinks a mindless chat would be a fine distraction from demonic angst. He soon realizes that a decade of nannying the wrong Antichrist has left him rusty when it comes to communicating with Gen Z, but Gen Z, much to Crowley's surprise, keeps trying.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: an age at least to every part [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1981162
Comments: 17
Kudos: 23





	1. oh it hurts to be that way

**Author's Note:**

> This fic can be read as a standalone if you can fill in the blanks of "they had lunch for 5 hours and Crowley is a hot mess." If you're reading the series, it basically takes place between chapters 1 and 2 of "The Love Song of A. Z. Fell."
> 
> Contains references to sex work, but there is no sex. In fact, this fic's negative valence probably neutralizes the sex in some of its neighboring fics. It does feature several misunderstandings about identity and terminology. And, naturally, arguments about poetry.

"nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy"

-Virginia Woolf, _Orlando_

Several hours had passed since an angel had been squired to a resurrected bookshop by an attentive and considerate companion. The demon Crowley, the squire in question, had taken his leave with the intention of returning home for an evening of quiet contemplation and rest. He felt soothed and encouraged by his friend’s expressions of affection and the firm plan they had made to reconvene the following day.

This lasted about three minutes.

Crowley had not gone home. He had walked straight to a nearby night bar where he proceeded to drink heavily and steadily, his faltering attempts to navigate the knife's edge between happiness and melancholy leading only to his falling down one side or the other, repeatedly, all evening long. By this point, he was drunk and exhausted enough to let his low-light heat vision kick into overdrive, making for a more psychedelic Soho evening than he’d had since the 1960s.

In that spirit, he’d terrified the jukebox into playing a Velvet Underground song that had never been included in its repertoire in all its 40 year history. But if you were going to go in for a bit of self-inflicted period pining, you might as well do it with style.

“If you want to sseeeeeee me, sorry but I’m not around,” Crowley intoned with the music and drummed with his fingers on the bar.

“I’m not around,” he explained helpfully to the row of top shelf vodka displayed on the wall across from him, “because I left the person who wants to see me to come here. Wily, yeah?”

If anyone had asked, Crowley would not have been able to explain why he was sitting (if we’re being generous) on a hard and spindly barstool drinking by himself instead of holed up on a comfortable sofa with his comfortable friend who had clearly wanted his company. 

He wasn’t seeking company of a different sort, despite what several of his fellow patrons had not unreasonably—given the venue and time of night—surmised. Each had received for their trouble only a stream of questions about the likely meaning of the verb “call on” used in a twenty-first century context, and whether they’d ever known an angel to go in for a bit of a cuddle.

To be clear: Crowley himself knew very well why he was heat-watching mating rituals done deceptively in DayGlo against a stark background, bar-lit and bible black. The reason he couldn’t have explained it to anyone else had more to do with the effects of alcohol on speech, compounded by the difficulty of providing a human-compatible account of discorporation, resurrection, bodyswapping, and a custom angelic blessing. 

Instead, Crowley was engaged in what he considered to be participatory listening. Usually, he did this in the privacy of the Bentley or his own home, but Crowley was drunk enough to be singing to the bartender and any available glassware that his best friend, who was better than a dog or car, did understand him when he was down, down, down. Just like the song, now on its fifth replay, explained.1

Crowley might have been able to explain to Aziraphale why he was drinking his way through a mild postapocalyptic freakout. But that would defeat the whole point of his not being with Aziraphale to begin with, which was to mete out Crowley’s particular brand of high-speed clinging pathos in more pal—pall…palliative? appalling? Appealing? Not quite it. But definitely smaller doses.

So there he was, nursing a Very Superior Old Pale brandy in honor of an absent angel and succeeding like gangbusters at not groveling for what was in fact very openly being given him. However, he was also succeeding at not sitting home, obsessing over the angel’s every touch and glance, drowsing into nightmares, and generally going all to pieces. So there was that.

“Palatable,” he announced, some time later, rather more loudly than he’d perhaps intended.

“Ta. Load off my mind, that,” said the bartender as he breezed by with some bottles of Budweiser. Or, as Crowley experienced him, a bustling streak of pulsing blue and yellow.

“Nah, I mean, that’s what I was…trying to say b’fore. In my head,” explained Crowley to his drink, as the bartender was long gone. “Palatable. As in, ‘maintain a palatable delivery vessel, you wouldn’t have me any other way,’ sssssoooo perfectly normal talk among mates, yeah? Perfectly Passing Palaver. Hhhhhangon, ‘palaver’ is Polari. Do angels speak Polari, or did they, back in the day?”

Crowley addressed this last question to a wider audience than his brandy glass, but received the same response. He soldiered on undaunted. “Course they do. Did. Doesn’t mean they mean anything by it.”

“Perfectly Passing Palatable Parley, maybe.” Crowley was enjoying popping his p’s. Plosives, hard to slur, a firm last consonantal stand against alcohol, give the lips something to get on with in the absence of kisses. “Parley, like pirates have, then. All fine among mates. Ahoy, matey! I’m a perfectly palatable pirate…” Crowley trailed off. “Oh, fuck me.”

He shook his head slowly, back and forth, entertained by the play of cool glassware barely glowing in his snakesight. “No, prob’ly not on, that. Still. Palatable.” He looked up, trying to track the receding train of his thought through the bar’s dim air. “As in packaging, wassit?”

“I don’t think that’s quite it, mate, but if you say so,” said a voice at his left elbow. Crowley turned to face a human-shaped blob of bright yellow-green with red intensities that had materialized rather suddenly by his side.

“Why not?” asked Crowley. He’d been looking for answers to his questions all night, and most of his fellow patrons had not been very forthcoming in this regard. “Why not—palatable packaging?”

“Eating packaging is…oh, what’s it called. A whole kinda disorder. Pica, but like—more specific. Oh—” the blob laughed. “Unless you mean edible underwear. In which case, yeah, maybe just. Wouldn’t say palatable, but then, that depends on who’s wearing them, doesn’t it? Buy you a drink?”

“Yeah. Very Superior Old—wait a minute.” Crowley looked more intently and willed some human vision to kick back in. Wasn’t going to be great, wearing sunglasses in a dark bar three sheets to the wind, if by “three” you meant approximately seven. Even if he could compensate for the liquor, there was the existential jet lag of the demonic soul to consider. Still, it suddenly seemed as if he might be missing important information.

“I think I don’t—” Crowley paused, sobering ever so slightly more. The blob appeared quite young, basically boy-shaped, glittering around the eyes and shoulders in a way heat couldn’t cause. “I think I don’t want to you to buy me a drink in the way you’re thinking. On the back of—edible underwear.”

A flash of white, Crowley saw, which was progress. The shape of a smile. “Well, that’s quite forward, bit presumptuous, but honestly, any way you want. I’m versatile as fuck.”

This last statement seemed to have been spoken more by hips than by anything else, Crowley thought. Game recognizes game, and so on. _Let me do a few tricks, some old and some new tricks…_

Crowley squinted, concentrating. His still quasi-herpetological DayGlo vision displayed Youth vibrating in light green-yellow, but now somewhat more defined and giving off definite signs of cheekbones, as Aziraphale’s blasted Oscar Wilde would have said. On closer inspection, dark loose curls, mouth full and mobile and probably capable of many interesting feats.

It wasn’t that Crowley didn’t understand what was considered attractive in humans. That was important professional expertise. In the past—on the clock, at least—Crowley might have flirted with Young Cheekbones, possibly to the point of kissing, found another companion, preferably one in a committed relationship or a responsible government post, got a threesome going, and left. But he was not on the clock.

“Thank you. And I’m sure it’s delightful in so many ways,” said Crowley, as one might to a particularly keen six year-old who wanted to show off their violining. “But that doesn’t change the fact that I’m old enough to be your…bib—bibliographic? No, that’s not it.”

“Bibliophilic?” suggested the versatile and apparently well-spoken young person.

“No. Tender subject, that. At the moment. Bib-something.” Crowley felt certain he knew this one. It was on both tips of his tongue. “Bib-lical! Course, that’s always a tender subject, really, but there you have it. Doesn’t change the fact that I’m old enough to be your Biblical ancestor. And not looking for that sort of thing. So thanks for thinking of me, et cetera.” He waved his hand to indicate et cetera’s full range.

“Suit yourself, mate,” Again with the hips.

But. In addition to being roughly the age of a newly-hatched fruit fly compared to Crowley’s extra-old self, Young Cheekbones had narrow hips in the basic design of Crowley’s own, and that held little charm for a demon whose tastes historically ran in a different direction—and not towards humans, in any case.

The thing was—the thing was, that Hell had wanted Crowley tempting humans, and so made sure his own palatable packaging responded physically to human contact where appropriate. Physical indications of desire were a powerful and persuasive aphrodisiac. He could even, if necessary, perform. But Hell was not interested in having demons enjoy millennia of erotic pleasure and fulfillment as they went about their work. Crowley assumed that that was why, whatever his body had been engaged in over the years, he didn’t hate it, but he didn’t particularly enjoy it.

He might as well have been doing filing work.

“You don’t know what you’re missing,” said the Young, who seemed to take rejection admirably in stride.

“Yeah, that’s really it, I don’t. Truer words rarely ssspoken,” Crowley hissed, and began to remedy his sudden sobering. “But I’m happy to further corrupt Our Errant Youth. If I buy the drinks, you can stay and chat. Sssubssidized.” 

“Fair enough.” The Errant Youth happily signaled the bartender. “Besides, Biblical ancestor’s inspired. I’ve had a lot of people tell me I’m too young for them, but that was superior.”

“So you’re erhm—into age difference, then?” It had been a very long time since Crowley had spent time with a young person over the age of eleven, and he began to sense he was a bit rusty.

The Young laughed. “Pays the bills, more like it.”

“Oh.” Crowley, who had not remembered to feel in the least flattered by the Young’s attentions, suddenly felt less so. _Turning_ some old and some new tricks, then. “I see.”

The Young bristled, red intensities brighter, shape glowy again around the edges. “Oi. If that ‘I see’ is a euphemism for some kind of judgment, you can bugger right off. I’m also reading English at UCL.”

Crowley dismissed half this idea with a wave of his hand. “I’ve been in an—an adjacent line of work longer than you’ve even thought of being alive.” Crowley wrinkled his nose. “Reading English, though. ’M more likely to judge you for that, to be honest. I’m in a spat with English literature, at the moment. Andrew bleeding Marvell, amirite? I mean, what did he know, really? When it comes down to it?”

Despite the obviously rhetorical nature of this question, Crowley, again, received more of a response than he’d received from bartender, patron, or any of a range of assorted glassware, all evening.

“Gardens,” said the Young in a soft voice. “Not really my century, but I think he knew gardens.”

“Gardens?” Crowley drew back. That was—disarming. “Oh, Hell. Or, heaven, whichever, take your pick, you can have ’em. Got a soft spot for gardens, though. Have for ever so long." Crowley thought wistfully for a moment of a certain African violet with tremendously soft leaves that would have made a proper coy mistress to any houseplant lucky enough to attract her attention. Then he frowned. “Can’t let the plants see that, of course, they take advantage. But maybe I’ll have to forgive Marvell if he’s good on gardens.” Crowley stared moodily at his drink and wished rather fervently it was a plant. Better to talk to, really.

“Forgive him? Only if he asks nicely, I’d say.” A lager appeared and the Young took a long drink. “Make’m eat crow.”

“Make Andrew Marvell. Eat crow. Wouldn’t have occurred to me.” Crowley was dimly aware his companion had strayed to a more figurative place in language, but sometimes hewing close to literalism was the more entertaining path. “Would he fancy a crow sauté, d’you think?”

“Whatever cuisine you prefer,” the Young pronounced magnanimously. “Should be about you. I’m a big fan of a proper apology. Plus Marvell being dead and white, probably owes us all one. Dead white blokes have a lot to answer for, generally. Living ones too, no offense.”

“Fair enough,” nodded Crowley. Demons, of course, whatever skin tone model they’d been assigned, had plenty to answer for themselves, but among humans, the pale ones had had a leg up on evil in many areas of the globe for quite some time. “Soo—how are you off the hook? Not white, or not living?”

This turned out not to be a winning conversational gambit.

“Oh, God. If you start in on how you don’t see color, I’m out.” The young person began to stand up.

  
Crowley was confused. “I don’t, actually,” he said, “Not—well, especially not when I’m drunk.” Sometimes, translating everything into human-compatible terms was a lot.

“You have got to be joking,” his exceedingly temporary companion said flatly.

“Fine. You know best.” Crowley was drunk. He knew he was drunk, and probably rude, but he didn’t know exactly how. “You might, on the other hand, notice my ssubtle eye-ware, and consider I might have vision issues, but then again, why would you do that? When you could use the opportunity for some recreational judging.” Served a demon right for picking a bar and barstool over a welcoming whiskey and sofa and letting his vision go snakey like he was anyone else. “Could tell you you’re from Bradford, if you’d asked, but it seemed—forward.”

A silence. A hovering at Crowley’s side. “Hey, no. Here’s me wrong-footed. I’m sorry. I could have wondered about the glasses, or asked you what you meant, and I didn’t. I was out of line, and ableist. I’ll buy the next round.”

Crowley turned his head. That was unusual. He’d been around humans for a long time, and that was extraordinary. “Color me impressed, pun intended. You do give very good apology. But no need to buy drinks.”

Crowley wordlessly signaled for another beer and brandy. They sat for a while in silence. The kid seemed genuinely sad. It wasn’t quite fair, was it? It wasn’t as if Crowley had an actual disability. He was a _demon._ He’d let his _snake heat vision_ take over. It wasn’t flawed vision, just different. In some situations—typically nocturnal ones involving prey behavior, so of limited applicability here—it could be an advantage. Which might sound like a decent way of understanding disability—again setting aside the prey behavior—but the immortality and miracles tended to put an end to such parallels.

Of course, the kid wasn’t to know that. Crowley was wearing dark glasses, it was reasonable to imagine that he had vision issues. Wasn’t the worst thing, maybe, if this kid gave judging a second thought the next time.

That’s right, here Crowley was, doing God’s work with Errant Youth. Aziraphale would be so proud.

Except that Crowley was possibly being a manipulative bastard. Or, in other words, doing God’s work with Errant Youth.

Sighing, Crowley focused in on said Youth. What information, he wondered, was he missing? The fact was, Crowley was crap at categorizing humans outside of where they fell on the good and evil spectrum. On gender, he projected his own experience and imagined it flexible and somewhat immaterial. As for sexual orientation, he found people to have a bit more wiggle room, so to speak, than they often claimed, given the right temptation. He was rubbish on race. His colors were always off, and how they sorted people changed faster than than…fruit fly lifetimes, and varied country to country besides. And then just as he, a pallid demon unlikely to be beaten or enslaved for any of it himself, had got to the point of thinking, well, this is awkward, race was deciding the fate of entire lives, nations, even continents, gender was determining centuries of economics and oppression, and sexual orientation was putting people in prison, or worse.

Most of it was down to Heaven or humans, anyway. Demons made trouble, but they didn’t make the stupid rules.

Glancing to his side, Crowley noticed that the Young was still staring dejectedly off into space, beer half empty.

It wasn’t that Crowley couldn’t be perceptive. If he concentrated, reined in the DayGlo, and considered the full range of snake, human, and occult sensory data available to him, Crowley could make an educated guess that this particular young person grew up in Bradford, with a mother of Punjabi-Irish descent and a father from one of three regions in Northern Iraq, had moved to London within the past year, and was currently residing in a shared house in Finsbury Park with Azerbaijani and German flatmates.

Of course, mentioning any of that was at best an extremely rude party trick and at worst indistinguishable from stalking. 2

None of it helped Crowley with his sorting difficulty. Neither was any of it necessary in order to follow simple conversational rules such as _not asking people whether they were white or just dead_.

Crowley often found that humans tried his patience, but he was unused to worrying whether he had tried theirs.

And yet—here was the first person who’d answered one of Crowley’s mad questions all evening, the first one who kept talking to him after he’d made clear sex was off the table. The first person who’d been even moderately kind, if opinionated and prickly and judgy and all the things kids were and should be. Crowley had wanted to save the world so humans just like this one could be here, now, angling for drinks and getting irritated by their elders.

“Hello,” said Crowley, “Hi.”

“Hello?” said the Young, somewhat despondently.

“Listen.” Crowley poked at the beer glass and signaled for another. “To be fair, about me, here’s how it is. ‘f I pay attention, and I’m not pissed out of my mind, not literally vibrating from a forty-eight hours like you wouldn’t believe, not filled to the brim with not giving a fuck about anything except the one person I just bloody walked away from—I do all right. Even in low light. If I concentrate, make translations. ‘S that I wasn’t bothering to. I wasn’t paying proper attention to you, young stranger at the bar failing to pick me up, and that was rude, which is one of my core competencies. So, sorry to be the Very Superior Old Pale bastard you don’t deserve.”

“Drink to that,” said the Young, raising a newly replenished glass. And then, with a wide smile, “High marks for winding me up, though. If that’s an apology, by the way, your technique needs some work. But if it’s not a rude question—and if it is, you’ve got one coming—what’s it look like to you, all this?” The glass made an expansive gestural tour of the bar, its post-pub and pre-club patrons displayed against textured Victorian wallpaper, beaded lampshades, and a jukebox currently playing “You’re My Best Friend,” by Queen, because Crowley had a bit of a theme going.

Crowley dutifully looked around, taking it all in, though it wasn’t his first visit and he knew the environs pretty well from more sober, less snakelit occasions. “Bit DayGlo, actually. Can’t seem to shake it. Lights dim but sending up patterns. People shiny-glowy. Very 1967. You’re yellow-green with red intensities.”

“Ace. I could definitely pull that off. ‘S it always like that?”

“Nah, I’ve got—adaptives, and focus, like I was saying. I’m just—very drunk, completely knackered, and pining like nobody’s business.” Crowley turned back to his brandy, drained it, and absentmindedly refilled it himself.

_Bollocks._ He hoped no one had noticed. He wasn’t even sure he could miracle away memories at this point. That was more Aziraphale’s talent.

That and cake-eating, kindness, and being an absolute idiot who’d got himself discorporated, laying bare the arid desert Crowley would occupy without the hope of Aziraphale and his stupid waistcoat and his delight in the world.

And just like that, Crowley was back in his own head, panic mounting. He had to put his glass down because his hand was shaking.

This was why he was drinking in a bar with young strangers, alternately offending and entertaining them with his snakesight. So as not to go spinning off in that particular direction. If Crowley could just make it through to—say mid-morning, he could stop by the bookshop, confirm that a certain angel was, in fact, still proprietor-in-residence, and—no need to think any farther ahead than that.

This poor kid, though. Still hanging around. Showed bad judgment, surely, but had to be worth more than two successive minutes of Crowley’s time.

“Sorry,” Crowley muttered.

“Let’s call it even,” said the Young, and Crowley could actually hear the smile. Astonishing. No accounting for taste, he supposed.

“We can call it even, but it really isn’t. Power differential—insurmountable.” Crowley shrugged. That was the problem, wasn’t it? He was _designed_ for coercion. “Biblical ancestor and all. And no money worries, me, you—working nights while you’re in school. And you prolly think you have to listen because I’m buying the drinks.”

The kid’s laugh was warm enough to have showed up red in Crowley’s sight. “Ask my mum how much paying my way buys you listening. And you look as if you could use to talk a bit more, actually. You can go pretty quiet all of a sudden. For a Very Superior Old Pale geezer. ”

“Ah, yes. ’My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me,'” Crowley said, doing his best to intone portentiously. "'Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.'"

“’S that a Very Superior Old Pale Poet?”

“That’s the bloody _Waste Land_ , do keep up.” Crowley shook his head, as if in great disappointment. “You’re the one meant to be studying this shite.”

“So sorry. We’re not required to memorize all _sixty-odd pages_ of the bloody _Waste Land_ until third year.”

“Soft.” Crowley smirked. “In my day kids had to recite _Paradise Lost_ before they’d get so much as a crust for breakfast. Of course, since I’m old enough to have been in the Garden during the original events, I had a bit of a leg up.” He paused. “In a manner of speaking,” he added, smirking a bit more. If metaphors were temptation, Crowley reasoned, literalism was a closet wile.

“Oh, right. Biblical ancestor, of course.” The Young seemed to be enjoying this well enough. Maybe talking shit was ageless. “I thought there was only meant to be two people in the Garden. Which one are you?”

“’The suttlest Beast of all the Field.’ Obviously.’’

“Oh, the Serpent, right, the Goth vibe makes more sense, now. But if I had to pick one word to describe you on the basis of our long acquaintance, not sure ‘subtle’ would be on the list.”

“Questioning Milton? Now who’s in a spat with English literature?” Crowley felt something tugging at him. The kid really did deserve a better drinking companion than a grumpy, lovesick demon pissed out of his skull. “At least the dead whites are a fairly quiet lot, nowadays, I suppose.”

“If only!” the Young practically swooned. “If they’d only occasionally shut up, I could finish my course a year early at the very least!” 

Crowley found his glass fuller than it should be again, and set about correcting that. “Oh, right. Your course.” He added a little more beer to the Young’s glass while no one was looking. He hoped. “Don’t they at least mix it up a bit, these days, or couldn’t you study literature from somewhere—less dead and white?”

The Young shifted uncomfortably. “Yeah, could’ve done. Do a bit, here and there, in Global and American, but those aren’t my specialisms. Course I could be reading South Asian Cultures, Arabic, Japanese. But I know English, so there’s that, and I’m crap at languages, and I got on the course and—” A big sigh. “I like what the dead English ones wrote, the bastards. It’s a travesty, is what it is. At least we’re on medieval now. Don’t have to bother so much about the writers as people, cause we know bugger-all about them.”

Crowley briefly considered remedying this situation, because he had a story or two he could tell about early prison poet and general menace Sir Thomas bloody Malory, but he wasn’t that drunk.

He waved his hand regally. “I can assure you on highest—authorit—oh, no, that’s an awful pun. I can assure you _on the basis of my significant expertise_ , that almost anyone who has ever written a thing worth reading was a complete and utter bastard, including the women. And ‘s not as if they’re Chinese or Nigerian, they suddenly get a good person pass. Still bloody writers, aren’t they? Mucking everyone about for their own amusement.” Crowley took a gulp of his drink. “Think they’re so clever.”

“I’ll drink to that.” The Young did so, but looked extremely skeptical. “But then why, do you think, does that all sound like a typical Gen X-er justification for judging the art not the artist, blah, blah, like what you want cause everyone’s awful so it’s all the same, free speech, whatever, nevermind?”

“Right. Gen X.” Crowley smiled to himself. _If by X you mean the axis of infinite extension._ “Ever so insightful. I'm fairly certain I just judged every bleeding writer in history, but you know best, ssurely.”

“That's likely, I'm extremely clever. Anyway, you think it’s all right to like what they wrote, when they’re bastards, the lot of them?” A more serious tone suggested an earnestness about this question, which Crowley wrongly interpreted as an invitation to enlighten Youth with more of his sage wisdom.

Crowley tried to draw himself up to his full height, but his spine rebelled in several different directions, leaving him somewhat less than half drooped over his barstool. “Young man. What you like—” he said, pointing pointedly at the air around him, “might not care what’s all right, yeah?” This didn’t sound nearly as profound as it had in his head, but he persevered. “Doesn’t work with people, tryin’a get their likes in line with—anything they’re not in line with. Theology. Cosmology. Whatever. Why’d you expect it to work with books?”

“Are you actually trying to equate sexual orientation with literary preferences, or am I fucking high?” A genuinely curious stare accompanied this question.

“I suppose you might be, I haven’t really been paying enough attention, as we’ve established. Immaterial.” Crowley drew a breath. “As I was saying. Any kind of liking, ‘s what I mean. But could be sex.” Couldn’t it? For some people, sex and liking coincide, Crowley reasoned. Hadn’t happened to him ever, but he was aware of the theory.

He drank to the theory, then continued.

“Could be, you’re attracted to—someone who doesn’t like you, or doesn’t like your kind of people, or who votes Tory.” Or is a _literal angel._ “Or maybe you just want to have cocktails with ‘em, because they’re funny. Oysters, even.” Crowley liked cocktails and oysters with Aziraphale just as much as—in fact, infinitely more than any sex he’d ever actually had. “There it is, though, you like ‘em. Don’t have to have ‘em, the cocktails, or the sex—but the liking’s there.” A fixture. Immovable as eternity.

Crowley sighed deeply and scrubbed his face with his hands. That was the thing of it, sometimes. He _liked_ Aziraphale. He liked him _so much_. He was lovely, and funny, and smelled of books and linen and tea. Crowley was simply having a hard time believing that all still existed, and wasn’t over, whenever it was out of sight. But he couldn’t go around panicking every time he thought about how much he liked Aziraphale. He thought about that all the time.

Crowley had to be able to think about other things. Like the person he was currently talking to, for example. Drunken banter between strangers in bars had literally been on Crowley’s list of the top 100 things he hadn’t wanted to get wiped off the face of the earth. At number 37. He should be here for it.

“Right,” Crowley said, deciding to continue with his edifying lecture. “So the liking’s there, and it’s the same with books but—less stakes. What I mean, ‘s there’s worse things you could be doing, than liking. Generally speaking. There’s—killing, fraud, bringing back those wide shoulder pad thingies—endless list, really.” Crowley nodded emphatically. “So, take… T. S. Eliot. I like ‘em. Poems, I mean. Even though he was literally the worst. As a human. And by literally, I mean not literally because I’m very, very fucking modern.” He preened a bit at this. He may have missed a number of linguistic and cultural trends among the over-10s in his past decade as a nanny, but he’d caught on to that one. 

“Modern like T. S. Eliot. Modern-ist? In other words, old-fashioned?” The kid was challenging, borderline rude, but Crowley liked that sort of thing. Questions, even rude ones. Especially rude ones, maybe. The whole point of giving an edifying lecture was the Q & A, surely.

“Oh, you are clever. But we can’t all be as up to date as actual medieval literature.”

“No, hardly anyone can.” The kid still glowed around the edges, twisting on a chair, staring at Crowley with a smug but almost affectionate gaze. “If you’re so modern, why do you dress like Camden circa 1989?”

Crowley rolled his eyes. Behind sunglasses, sure, but it set the mood. “Fuck right off, you weren’t born.” One advantage of rude questions is that you could give rude answers.

“Fair enough.” Grinning—rude answers clearly not being a problem at the moment—the Young settled back into the barstool, drained a full glass of beer, and apparently took deadly aim. “So who do you like, then, that you think is so wrong?”

Crowley felt his heart stutter, race, apparently do a bit of a soft shoe routine.

“Come on, let’s have it. You’re going on about it like you’re rehearsing for bloody Speakers’ Corner. It has you justifying T. S. Eliot to stunning strangers who try to pick you up in bars. You clearly want to talk about it.”

Crowley considered. Did he? Well, he clearly did, he’d been berating his brandy glass about it all evening. But did he want to talk about it with an actual person actually listening? Confiding in humans, by and large, had been a fairly rare occurrence for the demon. The necessity of self-censorship and translation was tiring and unfulfilling, and he’d sometimes failed and had to erase the entire conversation, which was likewise draining and always a bit of a letdown. Part of telling someone something was having them know it, after all.

Crowley let his finger trace the wood of the bar, against the polished grain, smooth and rough at the same time. A good trick. “Not wrong,” he said softly. “I don’t think it’s wrong. Plenty would. Sad thing, including him.” He sighed. Smooth and rough at the same time. “Most days.”

“Oooh. So he doesn’t like you back.”

Crowley sank a bit farther into his stool, the floor, the memory of a bandstand. “Well, he does.” The memory of a hand on his. The promise of world and time. “He’s said he doesn’t, but that’s bollocks.”

“Sounds like a prince.”

“Principality, actually,” and Crowley smiled a small, private smile, and ached with it.

“Are you in love with Lichtenstein.”

The laughter poured out of Crowley slow but unstoppable. “Inside joke, sorry. That’d be easier, though. Less of a cliché, as well. But nah. Best friend.”

Crowley darted a glance in the direction of the jukebox to gently urge it to play the Velvet Underground song again if it knew what was good for it.

“Wow, that’s timing,” said the Young. They listened in silence a moment. "Isn't this song about a girl?"

"Immaterial." Crowley dismissed the issue with a regal wave of the hand. “More to the point, would you describe this music as bebop?”

“Are you high? What’s bebop? Sounds like a robot for toddlers.”

“Yeah. Exactly.” Crowley nodded gravely. “Eighties slang for robot. So nothing like this music. Just checking.”

_And it hurts to be that way….down, down, down…_ Crowley hummed along cheerily. A little demoning—tiny language wile, nothing serious—was good for the soul. Well, a demon’s soul, anyway.3

“You poor sod,” said the Young. “Not only do you like someone who doesn’t like you publicly, you sing sad songs about him in bars. And this is what you call a best friend.”

Crowley shook his head. “’S a happy song. ‘S about friendship. With someone who understands me when I’m falling.” Crowley closed his eyes. He appreciated that happy songs by the Velvet Underground were tinged with enough darkness that a demon could relate. Their sad songs, though, could only be listened to in the privacy of one’s sofa with no one, absolutely no one, around to see what songs about blue eyes did to yellow ones that hid behind dark glasses.

None of that. “Happy song,” he repeated. “And yes. Best friend. For longer than you can imagine.”

“Longer than he imagined, from the sound of it.” The Young snorted. “No wonder you think you have to buy the drinks for me to have a bit of a chat.”

“Er—no.” Crowley poked at the beer glass again, sloshing some of its contents onto the bar. No fruit fly larva, however companionable, should be insulting Aziraphale. “I think that because you implied you’d have sex with me for money,” Crowley said acidly, “and so you’re on the clock.”

“Not on the clock, mate,” said the Young, dodging the spilled beer and seeming blithely unoffended. “I think what you’re saying is—that it’s all fine. I’m fine to like T. S. Eliot—which I don’t. You’re fine to like your wanker of a best friend who doesn’t like you in public. All fine.”

Crowley quickly began turning his ire at the Young’s attitude on himself. Crowley was giving the wrong impression about Aziraphale. It wasn’t fair. There was so much he had to leave out. “’S not like that. We could’ve gotten in loooots of trouble.”

Not only would Aziraphale go to Hell and back for him, but he had done it that day before lunchtime. But Crowley obviously couldn’t say that. He closed his eyes and saw Aziraphale’s wide blue eyes staring at him in the way that said so clearly that they liked to be doing it. He felt the angel’s hand in the crook of his demonic arm as if it were a perfectly natural place for it to be. “N he just had lunch with me for five hours. At the Ritz.”

“Put it in your feelings journal,” the Young snapped. “But anyway. You’re fine with it.”

“Yeah.” Crowley nodded. “More than. All different now, anyway.” Wasn’t it?

And Crowley was gone again, spinning down the spiraling ache of hope and memory and millennia of longing cloaked in cool and weighted down by the absolute certainty of his unworthiness. It was so hard to even come up for air, much less float along lightly, confident in his own buoyancy, long enough to carry on a conversation.

It was a lot.

Aziraphale had held his hand on a bus and stretched out on Crowley’s bed next to Crowley and said he was sorry for being unkind and changed bodies with him to face down a satanic execution and not one of these miracles was any greater than the others. Crowley could imagine his Bentley through an inferno, but how could he imagine any of those things that seemed actually to have happened? How could he imagine that Aziraphale could look at him that way, as if a demon was the shiniest, loveliest thing he’d seen all day?

And here that demon was, apparently talking Aziraphale down in a bar when just yesterday he’d been in a bar ignoring the impending end of the world because it was so insignificant compared to the end of the angel.

“Suit yourself.” Crowley’s fruit fly-aged companion shrugged. “Also, by the way, young, okay—but not a man.”

“Oi. Figure of bloody speech. Just—language. Never gets it right. So you’re not a man. Cheers.” Crowley paused, reeling himself out from the tangled threads of his thoughts (if we’re being generous). There was more than one way of interpreting his companion’s declaration. He frowned, considering.

“Not a demon, are you?” Seemed unlikely, but couldn’t hurt to check, Crowley thought.

Except of course it could, Crowley realized milliseconds too late. Because was not the kind of thing you said casually to someone who was _absolutely not a demon._

“Oh, very, very funny.” The tone said the exact opposite, and more.

It was not the kind of thing you said—because it might cause someone to sound that hurt. Because people would hear metaphor when literalism was not available to their worldview, and the most available understanding of “demon” was evil, or inhuman. As Crowley knew perfectly, devastatingly well.

Crowley was a conversational disaster, a demonic Hindenberg of discourse who should not be allowed out in public, at least not with young people.

This particular young person’s voice was now stung and defiant and not entirely steady. “Fully human, no matter what anyone thinks. I’m nonbinary, not nonhuman. Going to start with the pronoun lecture now?”

Crowley knew the sound underneath that snark and spit, knew it like his own echo, and it was soft and hurt, and had had plenty of practice at it. He turned to face the mess he’d just made and sobered up considerably. It didn’t help all that much. Of all the bloody mistakes, for him of all—entities, to make.

“Hey.” He snapped his fingers, apparently to get the kid’s attention, but also to turn up the lights just a tad. “Look at me. I’m not a meme. What if you stop talking to me like one, and maybe take a good look at who you’re talking to.”

Crowley gestured up and down along his body, his clothes, his tie, his general presentation. “Do you want to explain to me how you lot have a new word for it now, so I can properly exist? Or do you want to consider that maybe language doesn’t tell the whole story?” 

The Young did as they were told, gaze lingering on Crowley’s tie. “Oh. So you’re saying? Right. I guess. I mean, mesh neckties don’t ‘tell the whole story’ either. Not that bloody eloquent. Words have their uses.” Gaze hovered on Crowley’s boots.

In the brighter light, with more sober, human vision, what Crowley now saw plainly was a very young person, tacky, cocky, a bit femme, projecting confidence but not quite pulling it off at the moment. Who wore—eloquently—a filmy gold top over a tight spangled tank, smudgy tattoos feathering out beneath the straps, fake leather trousers, and knock-off Louboutins. Nail polish, dark but not black, just starting to chip. Who was—even more eloquently—bone thin, with glitter at the eyes but hollows under them, dark curls over skin paler than it should be. And who for some reason, some Godforsaken reason, had decided to care what Crowley thought of them.

What horrible luck.

This person looked down, and their shoulders crowded in on their spine, and they looked chastened, and off-kilter, instead of proud and slinky and snarky as they’d been right up until Crowley started absentmindedly questioning their humanity, and then, once again, telling _them_ off for not being observant.

Crowley felt long-fingered panic snaking around his organs again, his palms itching. He might be a demon, but he’d never liked hurting anyone—especially not a kid. Which this person was, and Crowley had somehow recognized and not recognized all night.

_You’d think I could go sulk in a bar for absolutely no good reason without causing actual fucking collateral damage to queer kids trying to put themselves through uni on some variation of the sex trade._

_But I guess, you wouldn’t think that, if you knew me._

He had to fix it somehow. And supply large quantities of nutrients on very short notice. Or Crowley felt like he’d never sleep again. If he hadn’t just promised the bleeding Antichrist himself that he’d stop messing people about, he’d have miracled the kid a sudden trust fund.

“Listen to me,” said Crowley voice as low and steady as he could muster. He reached out with one hand, touched the bony wrist on the bar next to his own bony wrist. Just gently, one tap of a finger, since his words had been working so badly. Touch had worked on him, earlier.

He could take tips in kindness from an angel, now, no one was watching.

“We’re fine. You’re fine, or you will be. You talk a great game. It didn’t even occur to me that you weren’t fine, which is why I asked you if you were a demon, which is a bit of an—another in joke. Not thinking, again. But obviously, you might not be fine, ‘f you’re chatting up very inferior old pale bastards in bars and actually caring what we think of you.”

“I’m fine,” said the Young, irritable and unconvincing.

“When I say that, like that, I’m usually—quite a bit fucked, actually. So here’s what. I am the last entity to judge you for any of it, obviously not for who you are, and not for however you to get by—jury’s still out on the English course.” Crowley gave a wan smile.

The shoulders of the Young simultaneously shrugged and crowded their spine more closely, which shouldn’t have been possible, and twisted at Crowley’s heart a little more.

“I’m Crowley. Male pronouns unless I’m making an effort to present otherwise. Not fussed about it. You be as fussed as you choose.” Crowley extended a hand, but it was ignored, and in fact, he wasn’t even sure it was visible to a gaze aimed that resolutely at the ground.

This wasn’t going well. Crowley needed help.

So he snapped his fingers and indulged—for one moment, the slightest pause in time—in the echo of an angel taking his hand and telling him that he couldn’t lose love, even when it wasn’t manifest. In a dream echo, maybe, of an angel brushing hair from his brow before dawn. And Crowley considered that if he only took these memories out very, very rarely, he might not use them up. He let the sense memory overtake him, how kindness felt when it was tailored just for him. And he tried feel how he might be kind, to this particular young person, in this particular moment, in a way that made sense for them.

He took a deep breath. “So here’s what. Let’s get out of here. Like you did pick me up, but I have this weird kink for talking. That happens. Let’s go get a meal, so you’re full, and then I’ll pay you—not for sex, which is absolutely not on, but for—vocabulary lessons. Up-to-date categories, and how to sort people—how you do, now. Not saying I’ll use new words, for myself, but it’s easy for us olds to get behind, yeah?” Crowley was aware his hands were shaking again, and hoped it wasn’t visible.

“God, Crowley.” Suddenly, the full blast of some very wide, very surprised eyes were full on him like floodlights. “You don’t have to pay me to get a bite to eat with you. I’m not hustling, I do more—arm candy with benefits, like Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I go by Audrey, even. It’s more chat rooms than powder rooms, but I’ve been so busy with my studies, I’ve hardly had time for sleep, much less—screening, setting up dates. So I just—came out for a drink. I didn’t come over for money, not mostly. And it’s not why I hung around, either.”

The Young cut off eye contact again and began talking to their glass. “I came over because you were a tragically beautiful damage portrait, sitting there all alone, singing and talking to yourself and some of it was fucking funny, but you looked sad and—that’s why.” They looked up wide-eyed again. “You weren’t up for anything, but you wanted to talk to me. Men—they don’t always want to talk to me, you know? And I wanted you to talk to me. And then I made you feel like you’d have to pay me to hang out with you.”

“Nah.” Crowley said quickly. “That wasn’t you. That was—a Divine Plan, is what it was. Kebab, then? And language lessons. Make use of your future degree. C’mon. I’m—not going to sleep ever again, if I don’t get you some food, but I don’t want you to owe me, that’s a bad move, owing—someone like me. Teach me something, yeah? We’re closer to even, that way.”

“Fine. If it’s so important to you.” Audrey sighed dramatically, “I suppose I’ll deign to eat food you buy me. In exchange for first-year Gen-Z studies. And chips. On two conditions.”

“For the record, no kebab is worth this amount of negotiation. But go on.”

“First, try—bear with me now—try saying, ‘Audrey, I’m sorry I hurt your feelings. I’ll try to be more careful about dehumanizing language in the future, and I’d like to get a bite with you to make up for it.’”

Crowley stared. “That’s—not how I talk. Bit direct. Too much for a first lesson. But—I am sorry I hurt your feelings, and I do want you to eat something. Close enough?”

Audrey rolled their eyes. “Only because you’re so old. Condition two, tell me more about why you’re sad.”

“I’m fine,” Crowley insisted, before remembering he’d just explained what that generally meant. “What makes you so sure I’m sad?”

“Psychology A-level. Not much gets past me, even when you cleverly disguise it by sitting by yourself at a bar literally drinking yourself blind and singing about how you’re down.”

“Knew you were clever. But I’m not sad. It’s a happy song.” Crowley stood up and stretched into his jacket. “It’s more like—'nothing thicker than a knife's blade separates happiness from melancholy’ and I’m toe-heeling my way down that edge in bare feet.”

“Ouch.” Audrey said sympathetically.

“Yeah. It’s a romp. Really am fine, though. Just need to get out of my head.”

Crowley meant to stop there. Instead, as they stepped out into the Soho night and turned down into the bright lights and bustle of Oxford Street, a completely true confession came spilling out. “Thing is, can’t get out of my head. Thing is, I’m in love with my best friend, who is a literal paragon of virtue, who has managed to break up with me repeatedly without ever having been with me in the first place, who spent several hours yesterday apparently dead, who after an entire eternity is showing signs of being interested in something different, and I’m in a panic. Obviously. So I came over here to reject all offers of sex, talk rubbish, and hurt the feelings of impressionable young people. And then buy them kebab.”

Audrey didn’t miss a beat. “So, demon, then?”

Crowley drew a sharp breath. 

He had been careless. Distracted. Taking too much advantage of his newfound freedom, probably, and now he was going to have to erase this human’s memory after all. At least that would take care of his sudden feelings confession. But it made him sad.

He turned regretfully towards Audrey, thinking he could at least miracle them a coat beforehand, because it was chilly for a tank top, but in fact, Audrey only looked playful again, head to one side, rocking on their killer heels.

_Oh, thank Satan. We’re done with the earnest for a while._

Crowley nodded slowly. “If you mean by ‘demon,’ the well-known Gen-X slang for nonbinary prat, then yes.” He took off his coat and handed it to Audrey, who shrugged it on without comment.

“Ace,” said Audrey. “So you can teach me, like, old time-stuff, too.”

“Really looking forward to it,” said the demon Crowley truthfully. It was cool outside, and the last vestiges of his DayGlo heat vision were rapidly dissipating as his forked tongue was flexing. “Bit of rhyming slang, back in the day,” he explained, warming to this new education project as they strolled down the pavement. “Pretty off-color,” he said, his mouth quirking up in amusement. “People weren’t so nuanced—played at genderfuck but thought of sex more in terms of either/or.”

“Genderfuck? Sounds hot.”

“Could be. More like drag. Fuck as in fucking with. Messing people about.” Crowley had been good at that.

“Ok. Bit of fun. I can imagine your being quite talented in the area of messing people about.” Audrey smiled, shiny and bright as the neon that lit their way. “So—what’s the rhyme?” They asked as they rounded the corner by the Tube station to the doner shop around the back.

“I think I’ll leave you to imagine what rhymes with ‘demon’ that might be indicative of masculine trappings.” Crowley was happy to share such authentic arcana with his new young friend. “It paired with any number of insulting terms for what people considered to be the other possibility.”

“Eew.” Audrey had got the rhyme, apparently. “That’s so gross! That’s terrible!” But they laughed anyway. “You poor things. No wonder you’re messed up.”

“You know us, we Gen-Xers. Very ironic. Cool. Unflappable.” Crowley stared straight ahead and leaned into his newly-assigned generational identity.

Audrey stuttered, still laughing. “Un--unflappable? You? You’ve done practically nothing but flap since I met you! You were flapping like anything before I even sat down!”

“Do you know how irony works.” Crowley deadpanned. “Perhaps they get to that next term.”

“You Very Superior Old Pale demon. Why don’t you start one of those brooding pining sessions where you go all quiet but get me double chips first.”

Crowley winced as they entered the kebab shop, where the florescent light made Audrey look even thinner. “Fine on the double chips, but I’m afraid we’ve reached the chatterbox portion of the evening. I’m a Satanic nun from now on.”

“Satanic nun?”

“More rhyming slang. Satanic nun, fun. Obviously. Thought they still used that one,” said Crowley. “Perhaps you’ll be the one to bring it back.”

Armed with kebabs (two for now, one for the next day, and one for each of the flatmates) and double chips, they retired towards a quiet corner in the back, made more hospitable by a snap of the fingers yielding mellower lights, a cushioned booth, and some actual Charlie Parker playing in the background, which Crowley absolutely did not identify as bebop. 

They talked into the night, Crowley stealing a chip here and there but steering clear of kebab, and were generally so engrossed in their mutual snark and tutelage that they failed to notice the young man behind the counter taking notes. But Mehmet was ambitious. He saw his job selling twirling meat on a stick as a very temporary weigh station on his career path to successful screenwriter. Having been advised to take every opportunity available to him to hone his craft, he often copied down snatches of conversation he overheard at the shop to study later, to improve his English and understanding of dialogue. He even marked the most unusual or striking moments for possible incorporation into future film scripts or, at the very least, social media posts, where he worked diligently to build a following. Looking over his notes at the end of his shift, he found that the bits of slang the older man occasionally shared were of special interest. Mehmet, you see, hoped to break into the period drama market and was always on the lookout for such authentic details to help his work stand out.

"Long night," he tweeted, "But in the end, Satanic Nun was had by all."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1 Crowley often sang the same song to his car, in point of fact, but saw no contradiction in this. return to text
> 
> 2 A similar display had once provided inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle, who’d had the misfortune of being seated at dinner next to Crowley one evening when Aziraphale had been preoccupied by Oscar Wilde—of course—and Crowley had felt like showing off.return to text
> 
> 3 For the past half century, Crowley had found a certain Monty Python sketch about a Hungarian phrasebook profoundly inspiring, and while he was happy to abandon many of his duties, he fully intended to freelance in the area of minor linguistic chaos whenever the opportunity arose.return to text


	2. love cannot be cured by herbs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “IT WAS ME,” shouted Cowley to the Pentonville Road. “No bloody poet race. Me. Demon. From the moment they put up the stupidest statue of the stupidest king in history and took it right back down again, King’s Cross was one of mine!”  
> __________________
> 
> Crowley walks his new friend to the station, occasionally remembering to speak to them, and then keeps walking. He walks all over London in an attempt to avoid obsessing about Aziraphale, in which project he is unsuccessful.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (apologies for the reposts. I am Unskilled at formatting)

_Hei mihi, quod nullis amor est medicabilis herbis_  
-Ovid

Damn braces, bless relaxes.  
-William Blake

Between the still-hazy synapses of Crowley’s conscious thought and the storerooms of his memory, a small army of recent impressions fidgeted restless. If Crowley allowed one up to the foreground, the others would surge forth, crying “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!” The alternative was to “close the wall up,” which Crowley thought made perfect sense until he remembered it would be closed “with English dead.” Crowley was not a nationalist, but that sounded very unpleasant.4

That Henry V's calls to battle adequately described his relationship to his mental faculties was probably not a good sign, Crowley could acknowledge, but there it was. Memory management was a hell of a thing. Allowing the past few days free rein would overwhelm his brandy-addled brain, while shutting them up behind a wall of dead would haunt him—or start to smell, depending on the degree of literalism involved.

Either outcome was best avoided.

To that end, Crowley was escorting his evening’s escort to King’s Cross. Movement and distraction, a fine follow-up to alcohol. New thoughts, courtesy of a nonbinary rentboy’s A-level psych.5

Untrodden pathways to revisit and wear down to the ground.

The main draw for Crowley at this point was the walk, and he was relieved that Audrey was content to stroll in silence. As the evening wore on, they had seemed to want to talk about Aziraphale even more than Crowley did. Which wasn’t great from a distraction perspective.

“So, your friend,” Audrey had said, one kebab in, swirling a chip in brown sauce before shoving it in their mouth. “The one who’s not a small European country. Is he straight?”

Crowley had laughed out loud. “No one who has ever seen or spoken to him for three seconds would dream of asking.”

Audrey allowed as they’d take Crowley’s word for it. “Married? Partnered?”

More soberly, Crowley shook his head. “Never. I mean, as far as I know.”

“As far as you know?” Audrey raised an exquisitely defined eyebrow. “He’s your best friend for years, and it has never come up. Ever being with anyone. He could be going home to his big bear of a husband every night and you’re none the wiser.”

“I—think that’s not happening.” It was difficult to explain that Crowley couldn’t really know what Aziraphale had got up to during decades when they didn’t see each other. “But if it were, I’d pay to see it.” He’d be jealous, of course, but it would still be hilarious.

“Noted. So. Think he’s ace?”

Crowley had frowned slightly at the shift in topic, but didn’t hesitate. “First rate. Absolutely fantastic. Hence the best friend bit.”

Audrey rolled their eyes. “Ace as in asexual.”

Crowley had only been drinking water, so his expressive response didn’t leave any permanent stains on the table or his companion.

“Hey, is it all right if I stop at a shop for a minute?” Present Audrey broke in on their earlier conversation with the dull edge of the mundane present. Since one’s own sputtering recovery from a spit take was a fine moment to miss, Crowley was happy enough for the interruption.  
  
“Closer to the station,” Crowley said distractedly. “I’ll go with you.” He paused. “I’ll need some milk,” which was not then and never had been true of a demon. But Crowley liked Audrey, liked playing person with them, and Aziraphale, should he ever enter Crowley’s residence again, would be pleased at the effort entailed in actually purchasing such a thing from a shop.

Crowley enjoyed following trends and music (when he wasn’t busy nannying), but he did not always get down to the human scale of things—walking to the train, going to shops, using the Tube for transportation as opposed to closing stations on the District Line. Human pacing could throw a demon’s sense of eternal time right off, a bit like crawling on his belly and eating dust, to be honest.

Sometimes it’s best to leave literalism in the dust before either one can catch in the throat, so Crowley continued on foot with his young companion, winding in and out of brick-lined streets in unhurried lamplight.

On foot but with a snake’s eye-view. As opposed to a bird’s. Snakes are closer to stones.

 _A bird is soft,_ something echoed from the far reaches of elsewhere. Crowley couldn’t quite place it. _A bird can go upwards,_ it said again, _a stone is hard and must go downwards._6

Crowley shook his head. ‘A bird can go upwards.’ Obviously. And snakes and stones can break your bones. But sometimes it’s not a loss to see the world up close at dust level. “We can’t all be birds,” Crowley muttered to himself. And stones can be softer than you think.

_Damn braces, bless relaxes._

“That’s Blake,” said Audrey.

Crowley startled. “Did I say that bit out loud, then?”

“Yeah, the bit about the bird, too, and the stones. Thought you were talking to me.” Audrey smirked. “A not unreasonable assumption, given that I am the only one here.”

“Ngk,” said Crowley. And then, a few moments later, “any idea what I was on about, then?”

“Nope. I thought you might.”

“Nah. Got these phrases stuck in my head, not sure where they’re from. Well. Except the Blake.”

“You must read a _lot._ ”

“Not so much, really.” Often Crowley’s role in literary history has been more participatory, but that’s not something he can go into. “If I go to the trouble, though, I like to remember it.” And that was true enough.

“Mmm. Selective. That fits.” Audrey fell silent, leaving Crowley time to wonder what, exactly, selective fit with, until they took up the other conversational gambit. “He was from right around here, you know, Blake. Back in the day.”

“Was he,” asked Crowley, absently, recalling how he’d first met the future engraver and poet as a child, not far from where they were walking. William had seen Crowley’s wings, shouted about them in the middle of the busy street. That was not _so_ unusual--children could, sometimes.But Blake was the kind who never grew out of it, one of the rare humans Crowley had been able to speak to without much translation, because everyone would assume he was either making it up or hallucinating.7

London was thick with so many pasts. Crowley generally made a point of misbehaving in the present, but if he allowed his mind to wander, it was easy enough to get lost.

Audrey chattered on about looking for traces of Blake throughout Soho and Carnaby with other students from their year at uni, seeking out shadows of workhouses and chimney sweeps, finding little more than bland blue plaques. Crowley nodded and “mmm’d” and wondered if they’d found their way to a certain bookshop, as Blake himself had used to do, and whether Aziraphale had shown off his manuscripts, or, more likely, suddenly discovered urgent business and closed up shop. 

Well. That had been a successful several minutes of not thinking about the angel. But all things must come to an end.

London had a way of layering the angel’s presence in quiet places. The upside of this was that walking by them could conjure comfort in periods of absence or estrangement—depending, of course, on the encounter living out its half-life on the premises.

A bandstand, for example, would be best avoided in the near term. Crowley had once avoided St. James Park for two generations. But it was a large city, and time was long.

“Let’s walk through here,” Crowley said abruptly, gesturing down a side street. “’S nicer.” He had a fondness for the little squares that studded Bloomsbury—specifically, at the moment, for Tavistock Square with its peaceable maple and personable squirrels.

Where just that day—yesterday at this point—he’d sat (on a bench, it’s what they do, their friendship a small infinity of park benches) with the angel, _as_ the angel, clasping hands in a way that said less romance than ‘let me climb back into my own body, there’s a dear.’ Where they’d sat together and considered how the next end times might come. Where they’d _laughed._

 _…but laughter is a leap._ A leap that comes easier with an angel _. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light._ What was it _on_ about? Hard things are _heavy._ And it doesn’t feel so easy when you sink from heaven like a stone.

Still, for all Aziraphale tended to have his own worries weighing on his brow, it was easier to be light around the angel. Earlier in the evening, it had been easy enough for Crowley to think nothing would ever bother him again, when the angel had been right in front of him.

Aziraphale isn’t just light, he’s leavening. Crowley falls flat without him, the corners of his mouth weighted downward.

_You can’t lose it, even when it isn’t manifest, it is simply always there._

Crowley wanted that world, but doubt was a matter of faith for him.

The fact was, Crowley was well aware that the past few days had blown Aziraphale up— _back, literalism, foul fiend_ —to loom ridiculously large in his consciousness. It was absurd. If Aziraphale could manage to defy heaven to return to earth, surely Crowley could gather together some semblance of himself instead of throwing his bits and pieces at the angel’s feet and demanding reassembly.

He was his own demon, wasn’t he? Crowley had a history, an art collection. Plants in need of trauma therapy. He memorized poetry he claimed never to read. Brought mobile phone networks to their knees. Glued coins to the elevator floor at the Russell Square tube station.

Crowley's fondness for this part of town was his own. It was for students weaving in and out of zebra zones as they shambled drunkenly towards residence halls, for tiny budget inns with tattered signs promising full English _restless nights in one-night cheap hotels,_ for sad-upholstered bars serving late meals to foreign guests, for every last inch of the city streets that simply still existed, all their shimmering low-key mediocrity that could yet play host to extravagant miracles noticed by no one…

It was all still there, and Crowley could see and taste and walk through it. He was genuinely, thoroughly delighted by this.

He’d even made a friend of sorts, for the evening, at least, who was here, now, content with being silent at his side, an extra witness, however unknowing, to this unacknowledged tapestry of the almost gone.

Of course, they had also been witness to Crowley’s dramatic response to new terminology in what had been a somewhat less poetic moment.

“Relax, mate,” Audrey had said, wiping at their face. “No need to go spare. It isn’t an insult, it’s a perfectly valid orientation.”

“I _know_ it’s a perfectly valid—I mean—I am aware, I just—wasn’t aware of the abbreviation. And wasn’t expecting the question.” Crowley took a deep breath. “Annnd don’t know the answer.”

Audrey nodded. “Your perfect understanding with your best friend is truly touching, how rare it is to know someone so completely.”

“Sod off. It’s...oh, call it ineffable. Until just recently, I would have said yeah, probably.” _Canonically,_ Crowley didn’t add. “Ace. That.” Crowley stole a chip to give his nervous hands something to do. “But now—he seems different. Walks closer. Held hands. ‘S not really a thing mates do, is it? Or it could be its own thing. Which would be fine. But different.”

“It _can_ be its own thing.” Audrey reached a hand across the table and patted Crowley on the top of the wrist. “Crowley. New friend of my heart. Fellow demon.”

Crowley winced. That particular language wile seemed likely to come back and bite him in the arse (not literally, he hoped).

Audrey continued. “I’m going to make one of those wild suggestions, but think about it. What if,” they paused, looking up at the travel posters showcasing holidays in Turkish Cyprus to rein in a smile before training their deadpan stare on Crowley, “what if—you asked him.”

“Asked him. What, like ‘Angel, wanna fuck?’” Crowley laughed hollowly. “I can tell you exactly how that would go over. Like a lead balloon.”

“You call your friend ‘angel’ and he lets you, but you’re worried about suggesting there’s something other than friendship between you.”

“There’s a context for it,” Crowley mumbled. He tried to pass it off as a work thing.

“You called him “angel” at _work?_ Oh!” Audrey exclaimed, a light dawning. “Your possibly asexual friend was also in the sex industry! You know, that’s not so rare. Lots of times asexuals get really good at performing before they work out their identities. ‘N maybe they’re less likely to feel like paid sex is missing something.” They gestured with a chip for emphasis. “You worked for what—rival porn studios? Different pimps?”

Audrey broke off because they couldn’t be heard over Crowley’s hysterical laughter, and they thought they might be needed to assist him in case he fell out of the booth.

“Adjacent field was your euphemism, sorry.” Audrey had said, sipping a thick, sweet cup of Turkish coffee. “Your friend worked in an adjacent—adjacent field, then?”

“His field could not possibly be less adjacent,” Crowley managed to say between gasps. “We’d have to invent a whole new geometry to express how unadjacent it is.”

“Okay,” Audrey shrugged. “I’m working on another theory. Not ready to go public with it.”

“Here’s me on tenterhooks.”

Crowley really did owe the Young a debt of gratitude. Even if they failed now and then at distraction, they did make him laugh, which was better.

So after propelling Audrey into the 24 Hour Food and Wine, Crowley insisted on buying them so many groceries and bottles of wine—“Here, take some cigarettes for your flatmates. I can’t get a reputation as a good influence”—that he ended by bundling them into a cab to Finsbury Park despite having walked them all the way to the station.

“If you give me your number, I’ll text you,” Audrey warned. “Don’t think I won’t.”

“Your threats need work,” Crowley told them, adding his information to the mobile phone suddenly thrust into his hand.

“Thanks for being so kind to me. I’ve really enjoyed talking to you,” Audrey said, batting long eyelashes and staring earnestly into Crowley’s grimace.

“Ngrhh.”

Audrey laughed loudly, eyes bright. “I knew that would get you.”

Admittedly charmed, Crowley found himself hoping they would deliver on their threat of texting as he unscrewed the cap from the other motivating factor of his late night chivalry. Nowhere between Soho and Mayfair could a single 24 hour off-license be found, and Crowley had wanted something man-made, or at least man-distilled and -blended, to take the edge off the rest of the night, no miracles need apply. Nothing fine, nothing he’d be tempted to offer up to an angel.

It was evidence of a bad job well done that King’s Cross could still be counted upon to have the basic vices covered, however many Hogwarts train platforms and upscale farmers’ markets sprouted up among them.

“'What poet-race Shot such cyclopean arches at the stars?'” At long last, the Chesterton poem was allowed to make its entrance. “IT WAS ME,” shouted Cowley to the Pentonville Road. “No bloody poet race. Me. Demon. From the moment they put up the stupidest statue of the stupidest king in history and took it right back down again, King’s Cross was one of mine!” He punched a fist in the air in triumph. "They never even changed the name!"

Crowley sighed in satisfaction. "Can I hear a wahoo?" he asked of a couple just settling into their blankets underneath an awning. They obliged, and Crowley was so grateful that he manifested keys to a very expensive flat down the road, whose owner kept the entire block of flats empty for vacation rentals. He explained his plans had changed and he couldn't use it, but the necessary documentation to stay the week was on the kitchen table, where they'd also find a pizza he hadn't had time to eat.

Movement and distraction. Memories of past triumphs. Landlord correction. Alcohol, always ripe for the comeback. Take the edge off but leave the knife so you don’t bleed out.

What knife, though, really? Why knife? Everything was _fine_ now.

_You can’t lose it, even when it isn’t manifest, it is simply always there._

The angel hadn’t been talking about the sword of Damocles, for Satan's sake, he’d been talking about love. _Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me.._. There wasn’t a knife. There was a world and time and an angel who wanted to hold hands and extend heavenly blessings to the damned—or at least one of them in particular. 

What was _wrong_ , in that case, with the blessed demon that Crowley now was? So obviously and visibly wrong that a half-starved would-be teen psychologist wanted to diagnose him over chips? So wrong that Crowley himself would go to any lengths, apparently, to avoid sitting quietly with the bits and pieces of the past two days and let them knit together?

Why had he won the war only to lose his peace? _In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man than modest stillness and humility_ …but what becomes a man in pieces?

A demon, apparently, in the face of hope.

Crowley certainly hadn’t meant to wander off in the direction of the bookshop. His entire night’s trajectory had been launched by the decision to be elsewhere, to go slowly and give space and generally display other adult reasoning such as one might expect to attain in 6,000 years on a planet.

And yet.

Crowley couldn’t help but notice, as he rounded a corner and saw the familiar storefront unaccountably present at the end of the block, that he had done just that.

It was _tempting,_ a siren song of reconstituted vellum and winged cocoa cups.

It shouldn’t have been so tempting. Crowley had successfully avoided panic for several hours now. He’d practiced distraction and redirection, as the parenting blogs he’d consulted during his nanny days had called it, although usually in reference to adults’ attempts at managing toddler tantrums rather than their own. Yet it looked as if redirection had decided to beat Crowley at his own game. Because there he was.

It was tempting, because all night long, not panicking had been a constant low-level trial, defaulting easily to terror with the slightest lapse of vigilance.

It was tempting, because prior to his experience of the past forty-eight hours, Crowley’s only context for harrowing, unrelenting loss had been his fall from Heaven, and even then, even when he was _Burning burning burning burning O Lord Thou pluckest me out_ , he hadn’t doubted that the Lord was _there_ to do the plucking. She wasn’t there _for Crowley,_ but She hadn’t ceased to exist.

In the bookshop, it had been _burning, burning, burning,_ and that was all.

Crowley knew it was how humans lived, with the constant threat and inevitable reality of that kind of loss, but—unlike buying milk in shops or taking the Tube for a lark or dining at the Ritz—it was not a part of human life that he ever, ever wanted to share.

Compare that to the day’s leisurely hours spent with Aziraphale which, although punctuated by poetry and crippling self-doubt, on the whole had flooded Crowley with feelings ranging from relief and contentment to enjoyment to desire, hope, and bliss.

It wasn’t, overall, a hard call, to prefer the place where Aziraphale was to the places he was not.

Why not, then? Was the more operative question. Why not just—go in? The angel wouldn’t be asleep. He wasn’t likely to turn Crowley away or withhold comfort and companionship.

“Yeah, it’s been over a day since he’d done that,” Crowley muttered to himself. But Aziraphale had spent hours quite obviously trying with everything in him to show that the affection he’d withheld was now on offer. That wasn’t driving Crowley’s current panic except as aftershocks of a particularly bad earthquake. He wasn’t afraid of rejection, not in the near term, not at the angel’s door when he was sad and lonely.

All right, that wasn’t strictly true. He was a bit afraid of that, in the way that aftershocks are, after all, terrifying.

But so is change. Even a change much to be desired.

“Okay,” Audrey had tried again once Crowley had stopped snickering at his supposed porn career with Aziraphale. “Imagine that instead of ‘Wanna fuck,’—which is, yes, admirably direct, but possibly limiting, hear me out—what if you said, ‘I have romantic feelings for you, but I’ve never spoken of them because of our work situation, and because I didn’t think you returned them. But recently, I’ve thought you might be expressing a different kind of interest. Are you interested in pursuing a romantic relationship with me, and what would that look like for you?’”

Crowley stared at them. “I refuse to believe anyone has ever said anything remotely like that in an actual life situation. It shouldn’t even be possible to _say_ that in English.”

“Ten quid says you’re more afraid of asking than not getting,” Audrey had said, psychologizing their way through their second kebab.

“You don’t have ten quid to say anything of the sort.” Crowley made a face that shouldn’t have been humanly possible, but Audrey had the manners not to notice. “Anyway, you’re wrong. I did ask, I begged, got turned down flat….”

“And did the world end?”

“Not quite,” Crowley said honestly, “but too close for comfort.”

Advantage, literalism.

Occult immortality did tend to limit the applicability of such exchanges. Now, quite alone on a strangely quiet Soho street, Crowley breathed a puff of laughter into the night air and continued to stand like an errant imbecile on the pavement just in view of his best friend’s bookshop.

If Crowley really wanted to break with old patterns, it occurred to him, he could swagger into the bookshop without so much as a greeting beyond…if not “Wanna fuck,” then perhaps “Fancy a shag, mate?” and a bottle of cheap whiskey.

There were so many ways any given moment could go, but sometimes, all of them led to disaster. The idea was to not hurry that along. Crowley feared that disaster was where his natural tendencies led—less to “fancy a shag,” maybe, which even he could rule out well enough, than to the next worse option which would seem reasonable by comparison.

Such as, “could I kiss you on the forehead, angel?” If you asked something like that, and the answer was no, how exactly would you go on from there?

Crowley sighed. He only wanted to be some approximation of adult about this. Or at least fake it reasonably well. At least enough to give the angel the time and space and freedom that he’d explicitly, or as explicitly as anything could be said once poetry was involved, said he’d needed. They had time. The had world. Couldn’t Crowley just _let him have it_ for one Godforsaken (presumably) night?

Slow was good. Crowley _knew_ this. He’d been playing the long game since Eden. He could white knuckle his way through this. He had _invented_ playing it cool.

Surely even a pathetic excuse for a demon could manage to survive hope, of all things.

So the demon turned tail (figuratively, to be clear) and headed off to Mayfair, to his grey flat filled with desolation and half-eaten rolled-oat biscuits, where he could at the very least terrorize his plants until a reasonable hour for returning to the very spot he’d just got frozen in. _Then_ he could casually drop by to reacquaint himself with his dearest friend’s continued existence for a few minutes in the course of a brief hello. How was any of _that_ pathetic?

This was the point at which Crowley failed to go to Mayfair.

He walked aimlessly, bypassing St James, wandering across Green Park and down through Belgravia, past silent embassies and consulates, willing each step to be only what it was. When panic started to claw at his chest, he’d have a swallow of whiskey and refocus on step, step, step. He went on like this for miles until, exhausted, he must have let his guard down, because he found himself approaching the river, headed through Chelsea towards Battersea and a bandstand.

As if visiting the scene of his very worst conversation of all time would be the thing. See the above talent for Very Bad Ideas. In this case, his imagination had somehow managed to take the notion of angelic comfort accruing around areas of London over the past millennium, and decide it would pair nicely with a recent source of absolute agony as if they’d been a good Manchego and a ‘53 Margaux. 

“Fuck _me,_ ” said Crowley out loud. “What’s it bloody take?”

“What if,” Audrey’s half-mocking tone echoed, “I’m going to go out on a limb here again, but what if you did a thing you thought would make you feel better, instead of worse?”

Crowley had rolled his eyes. “You mean like going to a bar to drink myself blind and offend young people? Cause I did that. You could be more observant.”

Audrey only smiled. “And buy them kebab. Ta—I coulda et the oven door.”

“Going all Bradford, then? Listen to you codeswitch.”

“Any kind of switch you—”

“ _S_ _hut it._ ”

“Anyway. That was fine, the blind drunk and all. Worked out for me in the end. Just not sure it made _you_ feel better.”

“You would, if you’d seen the screaming nightmare I was avoiding,” muttered Crowley.

“Fair point,” Audrey had nodded. “I don’t have all the information. Let me rephrase. What if you did a thing you thought would make you feel better that was _different from_ a thing you often did?”

Crowley had stolen another chip from the dwindling supply across the table. “What’s wrong with tried and true?”

Audrey leaned back and regarded Crowley from across the table, their eyes wide and unsparing. A bit of a contrast with the glitter. “Nothing, nothing at all, since you’re obviously extremely happy with how things have been going and you don’t want change.”

“Nghhk,” said Crowley. And he’d meant it.

But now. What if? What if he _didn’t_ go brood in Battersea? What if he _didn’t_ cross the bridge and stare at the bloody bandstand where he’d got his heart shredded?

As if by some miracle of common sense, Crowley found himself turning away from the bridge and towards the Chelsea Physic Garden. Which over several centuries had often been the place in London—outside of wherever Aziraphale happened to be—best suited to put a botanically-inclined snake at his ease.

Crowley miracled his way through the gates. He had been a regular visitor since the seventeenth century, although the gardens had been open to the public only in recent years. Of course, that didn’t stop a demon (or an angel). On occasions when Crowley hadn’t been cultivating a suitable persona for sanctioned entry, he would come after dark to look in on the more poisonous nightshades.

It was quiet time for most plants, but Crowley wasn’t particularly looking for company. And if he had been, the thick aroma of the night-blooming angel’s trumpet—a deadly poison Crowley had introduced to the garden to annoy his friend—was so present it could practically converse.

It had been not long after the Great Fire—not even so very long by the human scale of things—when word began circulating that the apothecaries were planning a new physic garden by the river. On overhearing the story, the angel and the demon met over ales at the inn across the way from the proposed site to discuss how the Arrangement might work in tandem on the project. They snickered at the idea of the two of them collaborating on a garden, of all places.

“Full circle,” sighed the angel, “and how handy it will be to have you on board, given that we want the humans to sample these fruits of knowledge.” He’d smiled somewhat dreamily and Crowley had melted into a puddle under his chair.

If an added benefit to their planned collaboration had been the possibility of meeting more often, neither one of them said anything about that. It was all physic and poisons and progress and the inevitable unintended consequences thereof, enough spoils for both sides. All that remained was to justify this activity to their respective home offices.

Aziraphale could pitch it to his people readily enough, what with the Edenic echoes, healing and useful plants (testimony to the divine wisdom of Creation), and the explicitly Worshipful Society of Apothecaries who’d undertaken its design and management.

Hell had required somewhat more finesse. Medicinal plants may have been a pet project of Crowley’s—still then and forever shuddering from the ravages of the fourteenth century—but that was hardly a winning argument for _his_ people. Initially, it had been enough to assure them that, in keeping with his mandate to counterbalance the angel’s blessings, he’d stock the physic garden with nightshades, mandrake, even hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Not to mention the deadly angel’s trumpet, which doubled as a dirty joke that pleased demonkind no end.

(“Angel strumpet, a night-blooming flower,” Crowley delighted in pronouncing the name out loud to his friend, in later years adding, several bottles into an evening, “the rare varietal of strumpet endemic to a Soho bookshop thrives on claret,” for which he would receive a flustered _look,_ and if he was lucky, a swat on the arm. But that was only later. The Physic Garden predated the bookshop as a meeting place by over a century.)

Soon after the public house discussion between an angel and a demon, the new garden’s keeper had the sudden excellent notion—he couldn’t imagine why it hadn’t occurred to him before—that the river could bring plants from much farther afield than the Cotswolds. In those days, the garden opened right onto the Thames and its barges, and Worshipful Apothecaries could be sent out along the river to collect and identify plants, which their apprentices could then be trained in identifying. And if a skilled fair-haired gardener (nobody remembered seeing him actually plant or prune anything, but the results couldn’t be argued with) encouraged the idea of heated floors in the early greenhouses where, amongst other delicate, cold-sensitive representatives of Creation, a snake might find a warm resting place in the endless damp of English winters, the innovation had conferred many more horticultural benefits as well.

And as for appeasing more eternal supervisors, the fact that the Garden had been responsible for the introduction of cotton to Georgia was cause for centuries of jubilation on both sides, despite neither Aziraphale nor Crowley having anything to do with it. Unintended consequences were their bread and butter, really, but also a Heaven and Hell of a thing.

Sighing deeply, Crowley wandered over to the Pond Rockery which, while not as old as the garden itself, was one of the parts that had remained as it was the longest. He sprawled against the nearby stone wall and stared off into a past layered and lingering among the greenery.

They’d often had the run of the place. Aziraphale, slipping through the gates in a gardener disguise only slightly less absurd than what he’d designed for his tenure with the Dowlings. Crowley, coming and going as he pleased as a visiting apothecary intern from Oxford. The Rockery had been new in an age that coveted novelty and so provided a natural(ish) meeting place for the two to stop and talk.

More ridiculous than Aziraphale’s costume was his complete lack of knowledge of anything botanical—to the point of recklessness.

Crowley called to mind one meeting in particular. On this occasion, Crowley had been collecting poisons to confuse the other interns with. It was an important function of the garden—distinguishing the medicinal from the poisonous—and Crowley delighted in making these training sessions as challenging and exciting as possible (the sessions were supervised by the greatest experts of the day who insured that no one got _very_ ill). When the angel had leaned forward to inhale the fragrance of one of the plants in Crowley’s basket, the demon had only just managed to jerk it away in time.

“Angel, easy. Sniff too hard at that one and you’ll be filling out discorporation paperwork in no time.”

“Oh!” Aziraphale’s eyes had widened. “Thank you. I suppose that would have been quite the feather in your cap, discorporating an angel with a flower. Poetic.”

“Yes, there I go again, sacrificing my own career for your benefit. But angel, honestly. Did you never get curious when literally all you had to do in the world was look at plants all day? What did you even _do_ in Eden?”

Aziraphale sniffed. “What do I ever do? Valiantly attempt to protect innocents from serpentine wiles, an endeavor taxing enough, I can assure you, that even failing at it is more than a full-time job.” 

Crowley’s mouth turned up at the corner. “My serpentine wiles have brought you biscuits.”

And then it happened, the smile of a delighted angel, focused wholly on Crowley and a thing that Crowley had done. It was never anything short of a miracle, however many times he’d seen it.

“Oh, Crowley. How very ki—” Crowley gave him a _look_ that apparently changed the angel’s course. “How frightfully demonic,” he continued, “Not the biscuit wile. Whatever shall I do?”

Crowley set the poison plants down and removed his gloves, then thought better of it. “Actually, you’ll have to fetch them from my pocket. Can’t touch anything that might go in your mouth after handling these, I’m afraid.” The words hadn’t sounded quite so pornographic in his head, Crowley recalled, but the angel was unlikely to pick up on it—or at least let on if he had. “I could have contaminated myself just taking the gloves off.”

“Yes, fairly warned,” the angel said brightly, and Crowley could have sworn he fluttered his eyelashes. “I do so appreciate your not doing away with me, on top of the biscuits. You spoil me,” he glanced at Crowley with a smile that looked naughty in a particularly angelic way that tied Crowley’s intestines into quaint little bows, “I mean, spoil in the sense of ruin, or—sully me, of course.”

Crowley had started. “I don’t think you do. Mean just that.”

The angel gave a high laugh. “Well, perhaps not.” He shrugged. “Something nefarious, in any case.”

Then Aziraphale, having just suggested that Crowley was about to ruin him, had removed his own garden glove from a soft hand that had clearly not been sullied by extended contact with soil or dirt of any kind. And, with that soft, pristine hand, he had reached into Crowley’s dirt-smeared coat, brushing the inside of the coat against Crowley’s hip and thigh in the process, and slowly if triumphantly removed the package of biscuits.

“Almond shortbread!” Aziraphale fairly moaned as he opened the package and inhaled. “How—extremely thoughtless of you, you infernal creature.”

There was really no question as to who exactly was getting ruined by this exchange.

Crowley had managed to mumble something that bore very little resemblance to “Gladyoulikeitangel,” and turned to the clump of rocks and plants that had given them the occasion to meet, intensely conscious that his cheeks seemed to be on fire.

Aziraphale had been perfectly happy to turn his attention to the Rockery, and was delighted with that as well.

Crowley resolutely refused to get jealous of a piece of landscape gardening.

The angel piously insisted that the hodgepodge of “rocks,” including the absurdly giant Tahitian clams and crumbled bits of the Tower of London, were testament to how the detritus of conquest and cruelty might be remade to add beauty and benefit to the world.

Crowley had rolled his eyes and asked if the angel thought that the new rock garden implied there was hope even for the serpent of Eden—or if Aziraphale was simply looking forward to constructing plant habitats from Crowley’s earthly remains when the time came, for the lasting benefit of humankind.

“What a good idea that would be, if only you were mortal.” Aziraphale had smiled and clasped his hands behind his back, looking every bit the gentleman and in absolutely no respect like a gardener of any kind.

Crowley growled that if they were waxing metaphoric, it should be noted that the carnivorous _Sarracenia_ growing up among the reformed detritus was a fine reminder that even serene beauty could come with teeth.

“As if I need any reminding of _that_ after five millennia with you!” Aziraphale had tutted, and before Crowley had begun to recover from the suggestion that he could be associated with beauty in any way, the angel continued. “Though serene isn’t perhaps the word—that is, I hope you don’t mean to imply that you’re planning on ingesting me any time soon. If you’re hungry, you might say so. I’d be happy to take you to dinner to safeguard my corporation.”

Effectively stalled out at the idea of ingesting the angel, Crowley could only nod his agreement.

And so it had continued for many years, much to their mutual satisfaction (and at least one-sided frustration). Aziraphale had been delighted with the medicinal promise of tree bark and the potential of spreading knowledge by virtue an international seed exchange, which he presented to Heaven as a way of spreading God’s Bounty. Crowley had been so pleased with the wealth of seeds—descendants were still growing in his Mayfair flat—that he’d arranged for the planting of cedar trees from Lebanon, remembering how over the course of millennia, Aziraphale had loved to lounge beneath them with wine and olives, breathing in their scent.

The same scent enveloped Crowley now, borne in on a sudden breeze, whispering the continuity of millennia. Millennia punctuated by moments like these—a hand in his pocket, retrieving biscuits, the compliments hiding in insults (and, of course, vice versa), and above all, each and every delighted smile. Such moments had sustained Crowley, no matter the accusations that were hurled at other times.

Those moments sustained other feelings, as well. Crowley breathed deeply, night-blooming flowers and cedar flooding his senses. He could recall other evenings here, or in his flat, in a tent somewhere not far from a battlefield—intimate moments teasing the possibility of other pleasures.

A whisper of naughtiness from the angel had always made Crowley breathless, useless, in a way no skillful lover or debauched orgy ever had.

The low buzz of desire was familiar, pleasant, sometimes tinged with anguish but mostly not, because it was never clear that the angel would enjoy such pastimes. Crowley could imagine that he would, in excruciating detail, but he tried to keep such intense visions at bay, as they led to an ache from which there really was no relief.

More often it was a quieter yearning, nothing like the hollowness that followed their more serious quarrels, and _nothing_ like the terror of losing the angel to fire, whether here or in heaven.

A different buzz interrupted his reverie—a good thing, because it had been in danger of spiraling down.

2:33  
**unknown number:**

u up pining demon

2:34  
**AJC:**

more like cedaring

2:34  
**unknown number:**

wut

2:35  
**AJC:**

inside joke again what makes u think im pining

2:35  
**Audrey:**

wild guess _  
_ what kind of sex work did u do

2:36  
**AJC:**

aaaannnd segue

2:36  
**Audrey:**

lol  
some people find it easier to talk about sex over text

2:37  
**AJC:**

we are not sexting  
That is not what this is, Audrey.

2:38  
**Audrey:**

demon if we were sexting u wd know it

2:38  
**AJC:**

never, never, never, never, never

2:39  
**Audrey:**

lol does that mean i am ur fool u mad king

2:39  
**AJC:**

u said it  
time to talk about u now tho this is also not a therapy session

2:40  
**Audrey:**

lol if it was therapy it would cost more than dinner and groceries  
also more than sex

2:40  
**AJC:**

again. never, never, never, never, never

2:47  
**Audrey:**

fine  
not much to say re me we talked plenty  
but i wanna hear about ur career  
for my theory

2:48  
**AJC:**

don’t u have homework

2:48  
**Audrey:**

don’t u have a life

2:49  
**AJC:**

i have plants

2:49  
**Audrey:**

That corpse you planted last year in your garden,  
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

2:53  
**AJC:**

that is one of the meanest things anyone has ever said to me and i have spent a lot of time in acual hell

2:54  
**Audrey:**

lol sorry  
guess its called the waste land not soothing verse for the lovelorn for a reason

3:05  
**Audrey:**

really sorry  
not me who brought up Eliot i was only reading it cuz u like it

3:07  
**Audrey:**

there's me backsliding on apologies  
look ur a bad influence u can rest easy  
truly sorry did not mean to b mean

3:09  
**AJC:**

not to worry just a bit raw is all  
its late  
or early rather long night  
gardens a bit of a soft spot  
etc

3:11  
**Audrey** :

still want to hear about ur adjacent field work _  
_

3:11  
**AJC:**

i cannot divulge the true nature of my work  
sex was just one aspect of its mystery  
i didn’t follow thru so much  
it was more  
leading people into temptation  
delivering them to evil

3:13  
**Audrey**

r u literally satan

3:13  
**AJC:**

closer than u think but no

3:14  
**Audrey:**

jk jk  
ok iv got it  
were u a fluffer for pornos

3:14  
**AJC:**

again i cannot divulge the true nature of my secret work

3:15  
**Audrey:**

as a fluffer

3:15  
**AJC:**

can neither confirm nor deny

13:15  
**Audrey:**

ok ur turn

13:16  
**AJC:**

my question is  
why biblical ancestors in bars in 21st c  
cam work so much safer

3:18  
**Audrey:**

maybe i just liked ur face daddy

3:18  
**AJC:**

NOT A DADDY

3:19  
**Audrey:**

lol tell urself that  
ve got a kitchen full of groceries that says different

3:36  
**Audrey:**

ok cam work  
i do it smtimes it takes a lot of time actually  
seems less personal  
kind of a lot about me tbh  
get bored w myself as i kno me well already  
also im a bit retro as u cd gather from the medieval luv  
lol  
but like I said im not really hustling whtever  
relally did like ur face

3:44  
**Audrey:**

and u

3:53  
**Audrey:**

did u fall asleep or did i offend u by calling u daddy or did i destroy u w direct communication again

3:57  
**AJC:**

bit of all 3  
now am cold  
am cold-blooded

3:58  
**Audrey:**

o rite ur the serpent of eden i forgot

3:58  
**AJC:**

yes dangerous snake not daddy

3:59  
**Audrey:**

fine ur a snek

4:00  
**AJC:**

go to sleep young person

4:02  
**Audrey:**

*changes contact name from demon daddy to danger noodle*  
u too danger noodle

Crowley sighed and turned his notifications off. Couldn’t keep working students past 4 AM texting. Wasn’t fair.

Was nice though. Mostly kept panic at bay until Youngs start bringing up corpse gardens. Dead bodies a bit more of a theme for his distraction strategy that evening than Crowley would have chosen.

He sighed again, more deeply this time, gathered himself up from the stone wall, and stretched, which ached more than seemed necessary. Crowley was cold by now, and stiff, too. He took a last pull of whiskey and turned back into a …well, definitely not a _danger noodle,_ he would have snorted, if snakes could do such a thing properly. As it was, he snaked his way into one of the (more modern, now, admittedly) heated greenhouses. _After the frosty silence in the gardens After the agony in stony places…_

For fuck’s sake. It was a good poem, but…it was summer. And sure, he was a bit stiff from lying on a stone wall and peering at a screen for an hour but agony was a bit much.

And the Physic Garden was not a waste land. It had risen from ashes and fallen on hard times and had ended as a quiet place for refuge and learning. And flowers. A space of solace in the city. Just as an angel and a demon had wanted long ago.

Crowley would have died (metaphorically) before he'd let Aziraphale know, but Crowley had helped the Worshipful Apothecaries with their motto, even before the Chelsea garden was a twinkle in their eye. Not the official part about bringing healing and whatever, but the part that came after.

 _Ah me, love cannot be cured by herbs_ _…_

Ovid had swiped from that bit from Crowley after a night out (drunk Crowley was nothing if not consistent). Of course, Ovid had then had the nerve to go and give Crowley's words to bloody Apollo, AKA murderer of innocent pythons unjustly called Pestilence. Pestilence didn't look _anything_ like a snake but when did a poet have any respect for empircal data? Crowley had done his best over the years, but all they'd ever done was take his best lines and ignore his historical and theological corrections.

To add insult to injury, the Apothecaries put Apollo triumphing over the python on their coat of arms. Crowley had had the last laugh, though. Got the shield designer drunk the night before it was due. In the end, it looked like Apollo was more likely to bugger the snake than kill him, so that was all right. 

_Hei mihi, quod nullis amor est medicabilis herbis...To cure the pains of love, no plant avails..._ Not to say that Crowley hadn’t given it the old infernal try, over the years. Not that any herbs in his vicinity hadn’t felt the effects of his ire at their inefficacy.

The other lesson Crowley had taken to heart from the myth of Apollo and Daphne was: don't let your carnal desires terrify Aziraphale into becoming a plant.

Crowley liked plants very well, but he liked the angel more, and above all had no desire for these, his first two earthly loves, to merge in any way, literal or metaphoric. Moral of the story: when people made it clear that they were fond of you but didn't want things to go in a certain direction, listen. Who knows what might have happened if Apollo had had some patience with poor Daphne? And supposing she _did_ want to stay a virgin forever. If Apollo had really loved her as much as he said, wouldn't he have rather kept having drinks with her than have her turn into a bush? Plants are nice and all, but they aren't as much company as you might sometimes want of a long evening.

Hadn’t Crowley himself experienced the payoff of the slow game just recently? Hadn’t he stored tartan pajamas in an overnight bag in his closet for years, a cache of fine leather, hope, and dread? And when their time came at last, hadn't he seen his gifts welcomed as thoughtful rather than desperate and clingy? A packet of Hobnobs had brought forth tears.

So Crowley didn’t need to be pushy and _ask for things._ He didn't need T. S. Eliot horning in with his frostbit silence and cold stones, either, not here, where Crowley had delighted an angel with biscuits, where an angel had arranged for heated floors for chilly serpents without ever saying so much as a word about it. Where Crowley had never asked the angel to be anything but what he wanted to be, certainly had never asked him to run off with him, and where Crowley had spent quiet hours in Aziraphale's lovely company as a result.

It might not be Eden, but it wasn’t a waste land.

Maybe when things cooled down for them, he and Aziraphale could arrange for T. S. Bloody Eliot to be sent to Heaven after all. Would serve them all right, really.

And with that, the Serpent of Eden curled around an equally out-of-place tropical plant that had never spent time as a frightened virgin, and settled in to wait until a more reasonable hour of the morning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 4 (He may have once recommended “Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead” as a Proverb of Hell, but both he and Blake had been very drunk at the time and most of Crowley’s suggestions had been characterized by the same concern for historical accuracy that guided his accounts of archaic slang. return to text  
> 5 If Audrey been aware that Crowley was referring to them as a "rentboy," they would have suggested more gender-neutral and respectful alternatives as part of their evening's tutorial. Since Crowley had helped engineer the Berlin Hustleball hosted by rentboy.com for several years, he would have argued the point. return to text  
> 6 This is Chesterton, but Crowley, who was a fan of his poetry and mystery stories, had unsurprisingly repressed “Orthodoxy” along with most of his more stringent post-Tractarian writings. Crowley had gotten to Chesterton on this occasion via a poem about King’s Cross of which he was quite fond, but this reference had not yet made it past the wall of hopefully figurative English dead to his fully conscious thoughtreturn to text  
> 7 To say Crowley had been around for Blake writing The Marriage of Heaven and Hell was a bit like saying Crowley had been around for Eve eating the apple. Exactly like that, in fact, although Crowley had been less reptilian and more inebriated.return to text
> 
> The Chelsea Physic Garden was founded in the late 17th century by the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries. Hans Sloane, of Sloane Square and British Museum fame, was an intern there before the voyages that led him to fame and fortune via milk chocolate (recipe sold to Cadbury's) and quinine (used to treat malaria). He became patron of the garden, which he rented to the Worshipful Apothecaries for a peppercorn rent in perpetuity. To my knowledge, there is still a statue of him in the garden, but the statue in the British Museum has been moved to a less central location as fortunes made from appropriating indigenous knowledge as "discovery" and profiting from slave labor have fallen out of favor. The Garden is now open to the public for educational purposes, but has a storied history in medical and horticultural research. And, in point of fact, a coat of arms over the entrance featuring Apollo straddling a snake.


End file.
